Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay on Lump: Surreal, hairy and like nothing else

Dynamic duo: Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay on their surreal project
Craig McLean15 November 2018

When Marling met Lindsay, things quickly got hairy. Within two days the musicians were in a studio in Hoxton. Within a week most of the lyrics for their unnamed, paint-still-wet project were done, and a concept had been devised, helped along by Marling’s goddaughter.

If she had a band, the music-loving six-year-old said, she’d call it Lump.

And so Brit Award-winning singer-songwriter Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay, the Mercury Prize-winning producer and member of neo-folk band Tunng, became Lump. And then Lump became a thing: a towering, hirsute, yeti-like creature that features slumped on the sleeve of the pair’s self-titled debut album and dancing in their videos.

Lump, the album, is a nine-track, 32-minute wonder-trip, an electronic soundtrack for a non-existent film inspired by Marling’s reading of the Surrealist Manifestoes. Beyond that, Marling’s description of the project, as paraphrased on the front cover of the Lump album, can’t be bettered, so I won’t try: “A heady blend of wonked-out guitars, Moog synths and pattering drums, set against droning, coiling clouds of flutes and lyrics inspired by early-20th-century Surrealism and the absurdist poetry of Edward Lear and Ivor Cutler, slicing though the apparent emptiness of contemporary life.”

It is, we might add, brilliant, all the more so because it’s physically represented by a creature that’s half Dougal from The Magic Roundabout and half Swamp Thing.

Says Marling, 28: “I wanted a physical, abstract, innocent, genderless — before that was the zeitgeist-y thing — creature that’s lost in its own universe to represent the music. So when you’re listening to the music you can feel lost in it.”

Lindsay adds: “I’d been working on a pitch for a film soundtrack that didn’t really work out … But once Laura came up with the name, that made the project realise itself.”

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On this grey afternoon, the first-time collaborators are sitting in their record company office in Shoreditch. They haven’t seen each other for a few months, not since a handful of Lump shows in the summer. But they’ve reconvened today to tee up what might be, already, Lump’s last stand, at The Garage, in Highbury, next week.

Lindsay has travelled in from Margate (home of “pirates, smugglers … and Tracey Emin”). Marling has travelled from Newington Green, still reacclimatising to London after arriving home 10 days ago. Having finished promoting her 2017 album Semper Femina, she’s just spent three months travelling Europe in a van with her butcher boyfriend: “eating our way round Italy and Croatia” and writing the occasional song on her guitar for “LM album” number 7.

The birth of Lump can be traced back to June 11, 2016, a magical happening that occurred in the everyday environs of a bowling alley at The O2. Marling had just supported Neil Young at the Greenwich dome. At the aftershow party the guitarist in her band, who also plays in Tunng, introduced her to Lindsay. They had never met, despite sharing the bill at the Cambridge Folk Festival and at a recording of Radio 4’s Loose Ends.

“I took this as my final opportunity to say hello,” recalls Lindsay, “which we did over a couple of whiskeys, and a couple of bowls — and I did get a strike.”

Tail suitably up, he asked Marling if she fancied collaborating on … something.

“He was very persuasive, but it was more about timing,” admits Marling.

“I had made Semper Femina, and it was being mastered, but it couldn’t come out for another three months for some boring reason — which is always the way,” frowns Marling, who first emerged in the same west London folk scene that spawned Noah and the Whale and Mumford & Sons.

“I hate that time because there’s nothing to do — unless I make another album. But then I have to wait 16 months for that to come out.”

From Semper Femina to carpe diem — she and Lindsay quickly wrote and recorded Lump. But then the project was put on ice for two years, while Marling concentrated on her sixth solo album. Finally, this summer, Lump was released. By then Argentinian motion graphics designer Esteban Diácono, in “creative discussion” with Marling, had conceptualised what the character of Lump looked like — albeit after a couple of false-start incarnations. “It was more lumpy — skin lumpy,” says Lindsay.

Diácono then brought the creature to life in the video for the album’s lead track, the swinging psychedelia of Curse of the Contemporary. He hired a hulking Argentinian ballet dancer to perform a motion-capture dance — imagine Andy Serkis at Sadler’s Wells — and then added the all-over body hair via computer wizardry. It’s a mesmerising clip, one that adds to the fairytale magic of Lump. You can see the follicles but you can’t see the joins.

Marling and Lindsay’s creature walked the earth in the summer, with shows at Oslo in Hackney and, later, at Latitude. Next week’s Islington gig is the last scheduled for Lump “phase one”.

After that, who knows? The pair are keeping an open mind. As Lindsay says, the shows worked “far beyond expectation”, not least because they’d never been sure Lump would work live.

“There were lots of other discussions, about it being a choreographed dance show or a film. But when it came down to it, it was badass.”

Marling agrees. “It was much better and much less terrifying than I thought it would be.”

Lump itself also makes an appearance onstage, as “performed” by the pair’s suited-up tour manager. Albeit briefly.

“It turns out that Lump is a bit overheated, and is not so happy on stage as we thought it’d be,” acknowledges Lindsay with a smile. “It can manage about 15 to 30 seconds in the heat of the gig.”

“The yeti outfit is essentially a ski suit,” reveals Marling, spoiling the magic just a little bit. “It’s absolutely baking. We have to have medics nearby.”

A good thing. No matter how poetic and artful the Lump project, Marling and Lindsay don’t want a death on their hands.

“We don’t,” nods Lindsay soberly. “Because he’s our tour manager and he has to drive us home as well.”

Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay play The Garage, N5 1RD (thegarage.london) on November 21

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